Extension:FeaturedFeeds/WMF deployment

Notes to site administrators

Wikimedia feeds

The following feeds are supported:

Name	Description	Projects available on	In user language
featured	Featured articles	Wikipedia
onthisday	On this day...	Wikipedia
dyk	Did you know?	Wikipedia
motd	Media of the day	Wikipedia, Commons	yes
potd	Picture of the day	Wikipedia, Commons	yes
qotd	Quote of the day	Wikiquote
wotd, fwotd	Word of the day, Foreign word of the day	Wiktionary
featuredtexts	Featured text	Wikisource
technews	Tech News	Meta-wiki

Message names

Each feed has the following messages controlling its behavior (replace * with feed name, chosen among those above):

Message	Description	Example
ffeed-*-page	Title of the page that contains day's featured content. Has one optional parameter, `$1`, which gets substituted with feed language code for use in multilingual feeds (currently, only on Commons).	`Wikipedia:Today's featured article/{{#time:F j, Y}}`
ffeed-*-title	Feed name	Wikipedia featured articles feed
ffeed-*-short-title	Short feed name, could be used on sidebar in the future	Featured articles
ffeed-*-desc	More lengthy feed description	Best articles on Wikipedia!!!
ffeed-*-entry	Title of each day's entry	`{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTDAY}} Wikipedia featured article`

How to set up a feed

Create a page named MediaWiki:Ffeed-*-page containing the page title (again, replace * with the feed's name). Two cases are possible here:

The wiki has a new page for each day, e.g. Wikipedia:Today's featured article/November 10, 2024 on the English Wikipedia. In such case, the title can use date and time magic words or #time parser functions to incorporate the date in the page title. The title in the example here is Wikipedia:Today's featured article/{{#time:F j, Y}}.
The wiki uses a single template that uses date magic internally to display proper content. In such cases, either point MediaWiki:Ffeed-*-page to that template directly, or, if it has ‎<noinclude> sections not intended for readers to see, point it to a page that contains a transclusion of the said template and nothing else.

If you need to translate or tweak interface messages of a feed, do that before creating MediaWiki:Ffeed-*-page, otherwise your new feed might take up to one hour to catch up these changes.

How to publish feeds in the sidebar

Just create page MediaWiki:Ffeed-enable-sidebar-links with content other than a dash (-) or an empty string. A section called "Featured content feeds" will appear in the sidebar on the main page.

FAQ

When FeaturedFeeds can be used and when it can't?

This extension requires an automatic featured content rotation system based on date. Currently, only content that changes once per day or less frequently is supported. Manual updates won't work.

Where can the feed be accessed?

The feed address will be in the form https://it.wikiquote.org/w/api.php?action=featuredfeed&feed=qotd&feedformat=atom (with your domain and feed name, obviously). Feeds are linked from the ‎<head> HTML section of the main page. The extension creates a permanent link for each feed entry (e.g. q:it:Speciale:FeedItem/qotd/20120117000000/it) even if the feed is loaded from a single template.

Our wiki's current featured content changes less than once per day, how can we use FeaturedFeeds?

FeaturedFeeds outputs 10 days worth of featured content by default. Thus, if your content changes at least once per 10 days, everything will work. Just make sure that ffeed-*-page evaluates to a valid title only on days there's new content available. Examples:

Featured article every Monday: {{#ifeq: 1 | {{LOCALDOW}} | Template:Featured article/{{LOCALYEAR}}/{{LOCALWEEK}} |}} will evaluate to Template:Featured article/2024/45 every monday and will be empty on other days.

Sometimes we have a new featured picture, sometimes not: {{#ifexist: Wikipedia:POTD/{{#time:F j, Y}} | {{POTD}} |}}.

I have made an edit to a relevant message, but the feed does not change

Feeds are cached for up to one hour. Because they are all cached in one batch, you may also not see a change after adding a new feed.

Can we put whole featured articles into the feed?

You'd better not. Typical featured articles on Wikipedia are huge and are slow to render - even though rendered text is cached, it still requires CPU time and bandwidth to serve. You don't want to have a sysadmin running after you with a huge banhammer, do you? :) Just stick to the same short excerpts shown on main page along with "read more" links.

Our wiki has a type of featured content not currently supported. Can we just reuse an existing feed name?

For the sake of reusers that might expect a certain type of content under a feed name, just ask us to add a new feed type and we'll do it quickly.

Our wiki uses timezone other than UTC. Anything we should know?

FeaturedFeeds honors time zones. You might want to use functions that output local time and date such as {{LOCALTIME}} instead of {{CURRENTTIME}}.

I did not understand a single word!

Just ask for help on IRC, channels #mediawiki ^connect and #wikimedia-mobile ^connect, we'll be happy to help you set up the extension on your wiki.

Technical notes for deployment

WMF configuration enables FeaturedFeeds on most Wikimedia wikis.
WMF configuration runs the hook code in wmf-config/FeaturedFeedsWMF.php on the FeaturedFeeds::getFeeds event to configure the feeds described above on each wiki.
$wgDisplayFeedsInSidebar is generally set to false.